Stripey Tights Wait to Leave for Preschool

I love stripey tights! These were on a clearance rack at Target last weekend, and I couldn't resist. Seeing them on my favorite preschooler's legs just brightens up my day.

The Mop

This little guy's hair is getting long! I just can't cut it yet because I get such a kick out of it. After he has a bath it curls up in the back and it just makes me giggle. After lunch today Gus needed a quick bath and change of clothes, because there were mashed vegetables on every part of his front surface area. While I waited for my first student of the day to arrive, I plunked him down at the piano. These pictures just crack me up because he looks like a musical prodigy, a genius of Mozart magnitude. Ok, maybe not, but I'm the mom, so I'm entitled to think so. Take special note of the sock on his hand. Little Gus has taken to chewing one certain finger so much he created a blister that got bigger, and bigger. It looks so nasty it gives me a stomachache. For my general health, and the possibility that the wound might heal faster if he chews on the sock instead, Gus now wears a sock 23 hours of the day. He gets to take it off to eat, since he's so preoccupied with chowing down his food as fast as possible that he forgets to chew his finger.

Spontaneous Rest

Oh the Exhaustion of going to church, playing in the nursery and having a snack with oodles of other kids. It makes a guy so tired you just drop your sippy cup and have a little nap right in the middle of lunch.

Every one-year-old needs their day of glory: bare toes and an under-the-bed plastic box filled with cooked spaghetti noodles. When Ms. CP was about 14 months I undertook this activity with some of my friends and their toddlers. It was such a riot, that I knew that If I failed to do this for Gus, it would constitute child neglect. Last Monday I invited a friend and her small daughter over while Ms. CP was at preschool. I cooked up two of the largest boxes of generic spaghetti I could find, unfolded a thin sheet on the laundry room floor in the basement and plopped the plastic box of noodles right in the middle. (The sheet was 25 cents at a garage sale last summer, so it didn't matter if I just threw it out in the end).

Oh the squeals of happiness, the pure and utter joy of a whole plastic box full of noodles, and a wooden spoon in hand. My friend's little girl was somewhat of a neat freak. She stirred. She swished her hands around. She stepped in the noodles and looked at her mother like, "Get these things out of my toes." Oh, but Gus! He was in his element. Throwing noodles. Eating noodles. Tossing noodles behind him at me by the fistful. He slid the noodles. He gripped the noodles with passion. He embraced the noodle slime.

There were noodles on the wall. Noodles on the dryer. Noodles on the washer. Noodles on the closet door. Noodles on the world map. Noodles on me. It was remarkable.

We cleaned up the toddlers but left the noodles for Ms. CP, who was out of sorts because she had to miss the whole affair. It worked nicely because when she came home she played in the noodles while I made lunch. She played and ate the noodles after she was done having lunch. She scuplted noodles and build a noodle castle after her nap, and she impressed the babysitter with her noodle creations while I was teaching piano lessons in the afternoon. Late at night, I finally got around to cleaning things up a bit. It was delightful because Dr. Pediatrician actually scooped most of the noodles into the garbage for me while I was at choir practice, so I only had some minor clean up to do when I got home. He said the whole basement was filled with the aroma of dyhdrated pasta.

At the library

Yesterday I let Gus out of the stroller at the library. This meant that while trying to read an article in a periodical, I ran to the reference section, the circulation department and the video display. I was in and out of the children's gazebo (a reading corner) seventeen times. I circled around the child-sized tables every four minutes, zoomed to the picture book section to rescue the order of the dewey decimal system, reshelved twelve DVD's and six chapter books, helped Gus on and off a small chair five times and made sure he didn't dump the entire bucket of crayons on the floor.

My big eater.
My cuddle bug.
My frustration and joy
that I chase without ceasing.
My precious guy.
My early morning alarm clock.
The source of much laughter,
always ready for a hug.

Princess in Red

Ms. Crazy Preschooler has finally learned to dress herself, which I am thrilled about. This means, however, that she undresses and dresses 27 times daily. Any event can spur the need for a wardrobe change. This morning while Gus was napping she came out in this church dress she somehow pulled down from her closet and the tiara Uncle Joey gave her for Christmas. I thought it was photograph worthy. I liked the deep red of the velvet dress and the sparkle of the tiara. And it was, overall, a nice change from the tutu and leotard she's been wearing for the last three days.

This is Ms. Crazy Preschooler, with a grandmother she loves very much. She's eating a snack and watching TV (which she rarely gets to do) at a hotel in Nebraska. She's drinking up some snuggles with her milk and relaxing after a great afternoon nap.

Bear

Ms. Crazy Preschooler has never really had any special animal or toy that she loved better than the rest or needed to sleep, but Gus does. I was shopping one day and I found this little bear with a music box inside, and I just felt like I should get it for Gus even though I really don't ordinarily do that kind of a thing. It just seemed so . . . Gus. And it was. From the moment he opened the box I wrapped it in on Christmas morning, Bear has hardly left his sight and he doesn't sleep without it. Bear is chewed. Bear is slobbered. Bear serves as a fuzzy Kleenex. He figured out how to put the string to make the music box work right away, and he just roams around with musical Bear every day.

This past weekend we went on a trip to Nebraska to see my cousin get married. It was a long car ride, and one time I looked back and Gus had fallen asleep snuggling Bear. I just had to take a few pictures.

Stripey Tights in Winter

The skies have been grey here . . . for weeks on end. My house has poor natural lightng in the first place, and things have been very gloomy inside all day, every day for I don't know how long, so I haven't taken many pictures, and the pictures I did take have been pretty grainy because of the terrible lighting. Last weekend, though, Ms. Crazy Preschooler was dressed so crazily, and acting housebound, so we went out to the backyard to play in the snow. She was a wild girl, all over the place. I love the look of stripey tights and snowboots. There are so many fun pictures from that afternoon I have had a hard time choosing which ones to post, but here are three. They always look washed out and fuzzy when they get on the web.

The Dollhouse

I am super excited about this dollhouse. I saved and saved to give it to Ms. Crazy Preschooler for her birthday. I don't usually purchase extravagant things like this for my children, and I really worried that she wouldn't like it after all the work I went through saving up for it. There was something so wholesome about it, though, and Ms. Crazy Preschooler has such an intricate imagination that I just had a feeling it would be the right thing for her. And it turns out that she loves it! I placed it in the attic, and she goes up there for hours and plays and plays with it. I have so much fun playing with her, too. We dramatize all kinds of crazy stories that we make up as we go.

For a special treat the other day, I told her that if she allowed me to take a bunch of photographs of her, I would sew her some little blankets for the dolls. Sewing material generally makes me quesy, but we ended up having a great time. Ms. CP was so excited to pick out which scraps of material we should use she could hardly stand still. It was so fun to see her so overjoyed about something so small.

This little boy in the picture generally tends not to behave for the other dolls and spends a lot of time in TIME OUT on the balcony.

Using My English Brain

The past two days I have been preparing to teach a class on writing a research paper for a home school Coop. Writing Pedagogy makes me excited! It is so fun to use this part of my brain that has been sorely neglected. I really do enjoy explaining how to use MLA format, and stretching student writers so that they are able to write an authentic research paper. I love explaining the writing process and practically applying it. I love teaching kids how to revise their writing and add details. I love encouraging them to change and combine their sentence structure to sound as smart as they really are on paper. Teaching writing helps me be creative in a way that is different from taking pictures, from teaching and practicing music, and from anything else I do. I love coming up with crazy introductory questions for my students to write about so that I can 1. see how they write and 2. know more about them. For example, "What would you do if a lemon the size of a car landed in your backyard next Tuesday?" I love making up a sample work cited page about giraffes off the top of my head to show students how to cite sources they might use in their paper. (I had a lot of fun creating fake author names and coming up with great giraffe titles.) I love teaching research papers because it involves learning on multiple levels: learning to write better, learning to write formally, learning to use a specific format for writing and learning lots of interesting things about a chosen topic. I love all these things, and I love teaching CREATIVE writing even more. Teaching writing just gets my blood moving.